The inter-book titles are all taken from 1970's-80's SF cartoons--"Battle of the Planets" (a.k.a. "G-Force", 1978), "Masters of the Universe" (a.k.a., "He-Man and the Masters of the Universe", 1983), and "Defenders of the Earth" (1986).

Oh, and Mr. Gibson bore a striking resemblance to one of the Decepticons from the "Transformers" cartoon.

I was really disappointed by the unnecessary death of Debbie. It reminded me of something Douglas Adams described as "Starsky and Hutch syndrome"; in that show, a character would be introduced , and you were made to care about them, only to have them killed. Her death served no purpose to the story.

I find it odd that none of the other incarnations of the Doctor (or UNIT) would fail to notice the 7th Doctor and his activities, especially after his little trip on the space shuttle. Heck, even Iris managed to track down the 7th Doctor! You'd think the 4th or 5th Doctor, both of who spent a lot of time on Earth in the 80's, would have noticed something.

Well, I felt as if Miranda or Debbie had to die to make this book suitably poignant, so I was relieved that Debbie was the unlucky one (anyway, someone called her the Doctor's girlfriend! DIE, WOMAN, DIE!)

You mean the Eighth Doctor, not the Seventh (unless you know something I don't). I reckon that UNIT DO know about him, but realise he's amnesiac and leave him well alone (admittedly this would take rather more restraint and intelligence than UNIT has so far demonstrated). The only time the Doctor is really noticeable is in the 1980s, and his other selves sensibly steered well clear of Britain during the Thatcher era. Unless they happened to be around during his spaceship-stealing escapade (which I'm sure was well covered-up by the authorities, given that it involved a rather large alien spaceship as well) then I'm sure the other Doctors wouldn't have noticed his business activities. They've never shown any sign of caring about bottled water, thank god.

What I'm really worried about is if Feiran or whatever his name was knew all about the Doctor's activities - right up to how much money he was about to take out of which bank in ten minutes time - how come he didn't realise that those activities continued into the twenty-first century? I.e. how could he possibly think he had a chance of killing the Doctor?

The Doctor's d-d-d-daughter is a d-d-d-Dalek? The Doctor's DAUGHTER is a DALEK?????? Someone tell me it's a lie!!!!!!!!!!! I can take his wife being a prostitute and his heart being AWOL and even his corpse being auctioned off, I can take him having a mother and father if I absolutely have to but I've got to draw the line somewhere and believe me, I draw it at this Dalek nonsense. I mean, she doesn't LOOK like one, for a start. And if you ask me, two-hearted mass-murdering perverts sound more like Time Lord descendents.

She's not a Dalek, she's a Klade!

YOU told me she was a bloody Dalek!

Why do I feel like I walked in on the middle of a conversation?

And what's a Klade?

Emily - I didn't tell you she was a Dalek. I was just talking about the nature of the Klade with you and suddenly you started screaming: "Ahhh! Miranda's a Dalek!" For what it's worth, the Klade aren't the Daleks. Their lack of pepperpoticity is a giveaway.

Mike - the Klade are the villains of Father Time.

Of course, you realize "Klade" is an anagram of Dalek. Maybe the Klades are the distant anscestors of the Kaleds....I think I'm onto something here.

According to Daniel *snort* they're what the Daleks evolved into. Which is s t u p i d, I mean the Daleks'll start a war of racial purity with any fellow Daleks who have an extra tentacle, so I don't see them being happy to turn into a bunch of good-looking blondes.

Emily, I only say these things to wind you up...

STOP PRESS! The Doctor’s daughter is NOT a Dalek!

God, that’s a sentence I wouldn’t have imagined a few years ago.

Well, I've reread Father Time, and it's pretty obvious who the people descended from Daleks are. Ferran and his brother. They are Faction Klade. They are a Fascist dictatorship. They say that the Doctor was an enemy of their race since its genesis. They have servants who wear grey clothes and veils and glide across the floor. They claim to be the supreme beings of the universe. Hmm. I have to admit, it was a bit thick of me not to notice all that first time round.

Miranda, on the other hand, has two hearts, is of the Doctor's race, and can open the Needle (that Time Lord thing in Infinity Doctors), at least according to Ferran. So it's pretty obvious that the Time Lords were the genocidal universe-ruling maniacs. As there are only four Time Lords left (OK, OK, only 'four of us' according to the clean-shaven man with the rosette in Adventuress of Henrietta Street) the Master is the prime suspect for breeding that deeply unpleasant race. Come to think of it, the Doctor's daughter being the Master's great-great-great-granddaughter isn't a happy thought either.

Why is Ferran so sexist? All this stuff about marrying Miranda to prove his ownership of her. His mother (yeah, it's funny to think of Daleks having mothers) led the opposition against the most evil dictatorship in the universe, and single-handedly sparked off a successful revolution. Admittedly deeply sexist societies can have women leading democracy revolutions (Asia hasn’t managed to have a single democracy revolution NOT led by a woman (well, except Thailand's)) but she was also a Senator and head of Faction Klade, so I presume there must have been some kind of vague concept of 'women are not useless pathetic creatures existing solely to scrub the floor' going round.

As the Doctor was such an expert in unarmed combat in Endgame, why is he beaten by fat middle-aged out-of-condition Ferran? And why does Ferran believe Cate when she claims the Doctor's dead? It's not as if he could have believed in her unquestioned loyalty to him any more, not after she tried to kill him an hour or two earlier. And he'd only broken a couple of the Doctor’s ribs. And he was well aware of the Doctor's invincible, planet-destroying reputation.

Ferran's change of heart after a quick chat with Miranda was also a little hard to swallow. As was him falling in love with her so fast.

Why did the Doctor tell Miranda to shove off just because she killed the Deputy? My father would have forgiven me that or anything, I'm sure. Even if it hadn't been justified, which in my opinion it was. The Deputy SAID that she'd have to kill him to stop him killing her, and it's not as if locking him up would have been any use – he'd proved his ability to walk out of prison any time he pleased. Why SHOULD Miranda spend the rest of her life looking over her shoulder waiting for him to pounce? AND he and his boss between them had killed her parents, in fact TWO sets of her parents. And it's not as if the Doctor was in a position to complain – even forgetting the vast crimes of his first thousand years, post-amnesia he'd managed to burn alive both baddies (The Burning) and perfectly harmless (probably) aliens (The Turing Test).

And why did the Deputy wait six years to escape from prison?

The cover is wrong. Even with Miranda no longer looking like a cyclopsian alien, she should be blonde, not black-haired.

When the Doctor disables all the Ship's defences, why does he do it for only twenty minutes? He could, and should, have done it for a day or two to be on the safe side.

Miranda is blonde on the cover. Take another look. Obey - or - she - will ex-ter-min-ate you!

I wonder if the 'four of us' in Henrietta Street is actually a reference to elementals rather than Time Lords. It suggests that the post-TAC universe has fallen from one that obeys scientific laws (where elements are those of the periodic table) to one that follows mystical ones (where we have the four magical elements - earth, air, fire and water)*. The Doctor represents fire (pace The Burning/Time Zero), Scarlette is earth (presumably), I'm not sure about the man with the rosette though...

Anyway, it's entirely possible that Miranda is descended not from the Master but the Doctor!

* There is an elusive 'fifth element'. Depending on who you believe it's either spirit or Milla Jovovich.

New-born babies often have black hair, even though they may have blonde hair later in life.

Miranda's ten in that picture. At least, I assume she is, given that she's that age when she meets the Doctor and lies around in the snow.

Daniel - Miranda is NOT descended from the Doctor you, you (hey Mike - am I allowed to call him a sick-minded pervert?) Not only would the Doctor never DREAM of having sex with anyone, unless he had the misfortune to be in a Lloyd Rose book, he's now a MARRIED MAN and as such wouldn't commit adultery even if he wanted to. (And his wife certainly isn't planning on sleeping with him - she fakes death to get away from him.) Not to mention the fact that every one of Miranda's family are genocidal maniacs, and how DARE you suggest the Doctor is in any way related - oh. Um. OK, I s'pose the Doc's a genocidal maniac too...

Given that Fitz and Anji are considered elementals, I'm pretty sure the 'four of us' would be Time Lords (otherwise, what with the Doctor, his Companions, the Master, Compassion's pilot and Iris there'd be six elementals).

What's Milla Jovovich?

I wondered if Miranda might not actually be a distant descendant of the Doctor and whatserface from FT. Though since they probably never had a child together (or - he added for Emily's benefit - did anything that might have led them to having a child) then I realised that was a wash-out.

Fitz and Anji are really only elementals by association in AoHS, whereas the Doctor is the real deal. Incidentally, if my theory holds then it seems likely that Sabbath has replaced the water elemental (Leviathan?) in the scheme of things, which makes the man with the rosette air. I suppose he always was a wind-bag.

Milla Jovovich played the title role in the famous French sf flick 'Le Cinquieme Element' (1997). Imagine Mel, but more waifish and Gallic.

You're •••• right they never did anything that might have led them to have a brat! Even Lance Parkin, with his total obsession with forcing the Doctor to have sex, had Debbie laugh at the thought that she was the Doctor's girlfriend.

I really don't think the Master was including Sabbath and Scarlette as 'us'. He seemed to be regarding them as replacements for 'us' instead.

Hmmm, yes, which is why I tend to think of Scarlette and Sabbath as 'replacement' elementals.

And Miranda's great-great-etc grandmother doesn't have to be Debbie. It could be any passing woman from the Earth arc! It could be Anji!

(I hope I'm not winding you up by saying this...)

Anything in AoHS is subject to debate anyway, as with all historical documents...

Daniel, you hope very much you're winding me up, which is why I will disappoint you by totally ignoring what you're saying, except to point out that in The Turing Test the Doctor catagorically denies any interest in that sort of thing, thank you very much.

Luke, I think the one thing we CAN take literally in Adventuress is that Doctor/Master conversation. Despite conflicting reports of there BEING a conversation at all. I mean, who of the possible eye-witnesses - none of whom knew anything of the centuries-long Doctor/Master feud (which presumably wouldn't have occurred in this new Time Lord-free universe in the first place) - could have made that sort of thing up?

it doesn't matter, because I don't care

What an interesting philosophy, Luke.

It's good, isn't it?
Stops all further arguments

'You'll like this if you like K9 and Company, the DWM comic strip Stars Fell on Stockbridge, Survival, The Lord of the Flies, Nicholas Fisk's Starstormer series' - DWM preview. Sorry, WHAT the HELL have ANY of those got in common with Father Time??

Lance Parkin in said preview: 'Doctor Who in the 1980s is not of its time. There's no reflection of the polarised political situation, cinema, literature, the space shuttle...during the previous decades, the series make references to the space race, and jokes about the BBC and inflation' - is this true? I keep thinking of Helen A...

'At Virgin Books, over in the Black Lace erotica line (also edited by the New Adventures' Rebecca Levene)...[is] The Stranger, in which a woman named Claudia Marwood takes up with a mysterious amnesiac who thinks he may have once been a doctor...Lance Parkin slotted a mention of Claudia into Father Time' - DWM. Why would anyone DO such a thing?!

'There are established protocols to deal with these situations, first drawn up in the Brookings Report in 1961' - this may not DIRECTLY contradict Sound of Drums' 'First Contact policy was decided by the Security Council in 1968' but it's rather odd to refer to a SUPERSEDED agreement rather than the one that's in force now and decades later is still powerful enough for a US President to sweep aside the UK and the UN.

chooses to hang around and discover who Fitz is rather than help Miranda rebuild galaxies.

Especially weird when you consider THIS sort of scene from The Turing Test:

'He crumpled slowly, like a flower without water. "They left me behind," he muttered. I knew then that this had been the Doctor's sole motive all along. He had wanted to get away: I'd known it from the beginning....all I hadn't realized was just how far he'd wanted to go. "They left me behind!" shrieked the Doctor...I saw that he'd had no more idea which side had been right than I had...He was looking around like a man who realizes that the prison cell is still there..."What am I going to do?" he asked, still curled up like a defeated child..."I've killed so many people," he whispered..."But never like this. Never without a cause. I just wanted to escape -"'

Yes, a few decades have passed between Turing Test and Father Time but absolutely nothing has happened in them...even in Endgame (especially in Endgame).